U.K. Computer Teaching Gets With the Program

LONDON—Every school computer suite across England should hang a picture of Eric Schmidt on the wall, and children should sing songs in his honor for saving them from the mind-crushing tedium of the government’s soon-to-be-abandoned computing curriculum.

It was the executive chairman of Google who used his Edinburgh MacTaggart lecture last August to shame the U.K. government into action. “I was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn’t even taught as standard in U.K. schools,” he said. “That is just throwing away your great computing heritage.”

The U.K. government took on board the stinging criticism of the computing curriculum and the education minister, Michael Gove, Wednesday announced that he was scrapping the current curriculum. “From this September, all schools will be free to use the amazing resources that already exist on the Web,” he told the annual education technology conference in London.

The late and unlamented computing curriculum was, at heart, little more than an extended training session in Microsoft Office. Students learned how to use PowerPoint and Excel, not to code. And was it ever so dull.

My eldest daughter recently had to take an IT exam at 16. If you wanted to crush the life out of the subject, if you wanted to turn off an entire generation to the excitement of what you can do with computing, then you could not have devised a better project than the one she and her classmates, all of whom are on Facebook, Twitter and have mobile phones, were set. They had to draw up a database schema in Microsoft Access for a dentist’s billing system. Be still my beating heart.

How far, in the wrong direction, we have travelled. When I was 16, taking what we were told was the first “O” Level in computing (a key exam for students with university hopes), we could pick any project we wanted; mine was to write an assembly language emulator. I was told it was a bit unambitious.

But this is not a call to some nostalgic lost era of education, and nor is the life-crushing tedium of school computing unique to the U.K. It appears, in a straw poll, to be common across a lot of Western Europe.

Salar al Khafaji, a Dutch entrepreneur who went to school in Amsterdam, said it was much the same there. “I had been programming since I was 10 years old and having to sit through hour-long courses teaching you ‘e-mail’ can hardly be called motivational.” Christian Lanng, CEO of the Copenhagen-based Tradeshift said: “We learned no coding from school. I learned to code Basic at my Commodore 64 at the age of 7.”

However, talking to entrepreneurs in eastern Europe a different picture emerges.Kristjan Hiiemaa, of Estonian start-up Erply, said he did a lot of coding at Märjamaa high school. “We did basic programming, Visual Basic programming, Excel advanced macros. I was able to write code, build applications. That was fun.” The same applies to Mischa Dohler, of Barcelona-based Worldsensing, who grew up in Jena in what was then East Germany. “We were taught assembler and basic on the then-available computers. I got a Commodore and Atari later (when the Wall came down) at home and programmed games and alike.”

Mr. Gove’s initiative needs to be looked at in a wider, political, context. The U.K. government is investing a large amount of political capital in supporting and promoting the start up culture. Hardly a day goes by without ministers, or even royalty, getting involved. A recent report by the U.K.’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts said that just 6% of U.K. businesses with the highest growth rates generated half of the new jobs created between 2002 and 2008; many, if not all, of those are industries dependent on technology skills. The old curriculum was not just an impediment, it was actually driving people away. In 2011, just 31,800 pupils took the computing exam at 16, compared to 81,100 in 2007. This has, said Peter Barron, head of external relations for Google, resulted “in a work force that lacks the key skills needed to help drive the U.K.’s economic growth.”

However, the U.K. lacks the teachers to provide this dynamic, engaging and relevant computing education. Data from the U.K.’s General Teaching Council suggest that of the 28,767 teachers who registered with the GTC in 2010, only three qualified in computing or computing science as their primary qualification. It is no good being taught Javascript by the Geography teacher. Sensible schools will look outside their own ranks for help; sensible corporations will offer it.

However, schools should be wary of equipping students with the wrong skills.

Mr. Lanng might be a case in point. “When I was at school everyone was playing Tetris. … I went in and hacked the executable file and edited my high score on all the computers. Unfortunately the number I picked was too long, which made all the computers crash at random intervals with a popup with a very long number and my name next to it. I was banned from the computer room for a week.”

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Tech Europe covers Europe’s technology leaders, their companies, and the people and industries that support them — and their ideas. The blog is edited by Ben Rooney, with contributions from The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires.